Shatterd Pane
by MoshPit
Summary: Virginia has left Wolf for good, but, not wanting to give up so easily, Wolf strikes back, this time with sights set on a different target. A sequel to "Inhuman Nature." Update July 15.
1. Chapter One

Virginia pondered herself in the full-length mirror hanging from her bathroom door. It had been years since she had disappeared into the world of the nine kingdoms, since her father had decided to break his ties with the world he once succeeded in. They'd kept the original mirror, Virginia and Wolf, receiving it as a present from Wendell in gratitude for their actions in protecting the state of the Fourth Kingdom. The two had left the connection open, never with the intention to return, but to keep the lines available should Tony feel ready to come home. They'd received little letters through the pane, occasionally, messages from the other side, scrawled in Tony's disjointed lettering, detailing his latest achievements, or the most recent young maiden he'd happed to charm.

Even less frequently, Tony would step through the fissure between dimensions, spending a few uncomfortable minutes conversing with his daughter and son-in-law, taking hold if his grandsons with great trepidation, before graciously muttering his good-byes and vanishing through the gilded mirror. Less and less often, his letters would come, until eventually, they stopped coming altogether. Virginia received only one more letter from the nine kingdoms after her father's last, this one from King Wendell. _Dearest Virginia_, it began in the delicately looped penmanship, so strikingly different from her father's, _I write to you with the grave duty of informing you of your father's disappearance from my kingdom…_ and she could read no further than that before her stomach collapsed into her knees. Wolf had found her that night tragically curled on the bathroom floor, vomit staining the tile and the front of her shirt.

She'd left the mirror with Wolf, afterwards, a decision she would come to question for the next year and a half. She wouldn't dare to go back, despite her want; it wasn't the mirror that she desired, but the connection. Virginia never considered herself a naïve girl, but part of her refused to let go of the idea that someday, her father might not only return to the Fourth Kingdom, but to his home, here in New York. That part of her never forgave her choice to leave the mirror in the hands of that monster.

Richard had never met Tony; he knew very little of Virginia's life before him. She'd told him little of her history, carefully omitting anything relevant to her mother's altered state of mind (she found it easier to tell him the lie she thought she had lived), anything that hinted at Wolf's feral nature, anything that referenced the world of the Nine Kingdoms. The lies had been adequate, and nothing further had been pressed; Richard, completely taken with the sweet-faced girl who came to him for help, opened his heart to her, and welcomed her wholly into his life.

She found, in Richard, a sense of normalcy denied her in her life with wolf. Richard didn't crave raw meat violently; Richard didn't suffer drastic mood swings; Richard didn't need to be chained within the linen closet for three nights every month.

Virginia ran slender fingers across her profile; thirty loomed in the near future, and though she was still a young woman, she felt sometimes as if she had lived a full life twice over. Lines of stress had begun etching their way around her eyes, taking a detour to pull at the corners of her mouth.

She would dream, sometimes, that she had never followed the dog; that she had turned back once she reached the tear in the fabric of reality. These dreams were peppered with honest smiles, with tears of mirth, with a future not marred by a pane of glass. That journey, though dear to her heart, had caused to much pain, too much sorrow, and had tainted too many lives.

Virginia looked again at the crumpled letter she held in her hands. _I write to you with the grave duty… _She'd never intended to return to the Nine Kingdoms; yes, her father was missing somewhere in that domain, and she desperately wished to see him again, but she never thought it would be her business to root him out if he didn't want to be found.

__

I know were to find Tony, he had said, a futile last-ditch effort to needle her into staying with him. Wolf had seen how broken she was at discovering Tony's disappearance, and knew that any hope he could give her had as good a chance as any. She'd prevailed that night. For too long she'd stayed with Wolf out of fear of the outside world, out of fear that no other man would dare to touch her after marrying a fairy tale creature. Her savior came with a comic book name, and she found she didn't have to believe Wolf's tales anymore.

Virginia's gaze shifted to another letter, ink still fresh, resting ominously on her bureau. This had been a letter of threat, a letter of pleading, a letter of promised mercy. Virginia never intended to return to the Nine Kingdoms, but found now that she had to. The darkness of the kingdoms had taken her father, and now, its bastard son had taken her husband.


	2. Chapter Two

Richard felt cold, and gritty, and hurt. The cold came from him having been stripped of most of his clothes. The gritty came from unknown clumps and particles gracing what felt like a dirt-floored cave. The hurt came from the deep, red welts left on his skin after being ambushed by something unthinkably heavy. And sharp. He'd been mugged, he thought, and was lying in a forsaken alley in the corner of nowhere. Nearby, he though he heard the rats waiting for him to expire. Moisture slid over his side, where the brunt of his pain originated, leaving a sticky, wet puddle for him to lie in.

Richard opened his eyes, and shut them immediately, blinded by a burst of darkness and pain. Unmoving, he tried to recount his steps that evening, wondered at what point he'd wandered into the shady side of New York, and left himself open to such a predicable attack, and was surprised to find that he couldn't explain it. It puzzled him that his mugger bothered to take his jacket _and_ shirt, because although his jacket was a rather expensive leather coat, a garment much admired by his mates at the department, the shirt was an comfortably ugly piece of flannel that looked better suited for a lost lumberjack.

His temples throbbed; whoever had jumped him had done quite a number on his head. Timidly, moving his body as little as he could, Richard opened his eyes. He blinked, slowly, letting himself become accustomed to his surroundings. He was _not_ in an alley, as he had previously suspected, and found himself surrounded with four mildew-encrusted walls. His fingers jerked, scraping against a dirt covered stone floor.

On the far wall, a window-a _barred_ window- cast long shadows in the moonlight across Richard's face. Opposite the window, a heavy door, most likely crafted from oak, provided the only barrier between himself and the outside. Later, when the light was better, Richard would see the deep marks marring the heavy wood.

Richard had been inside jail cells before; he was a member of the NYPD after all, and he'd seen his fair share of the consequences of felony. Those blocks had always seemed sterile, in a grungy sort of way. Not pristine sparkling white, but not so dirty that you _really _had to worry about the bed bugs. This unit had a stack of beds, three mattresses high, shoved against a mud stained wall, crusted over with urine and excrement. The mattresses themselves appeared yellowed with age and bodily fluids; when a small animal ran across one, it released a stale cloud of dust, crackling with disuse. The cells Richard remembered had a commode, grimy though it may have been (whether it worked or not hardly seemed relevant). Here, the lavatory was represented with a hole in the floor that teemed with parasitic life even from Richard's ground level perspective.

Rolling his head to one side, and feeling a rip of searing pain race down his side as he did, Richard contemplated his current situation. Though he dearly didn't want to be the next name on a long list of people abducted and slaughtered by tortured madmen, the facts leaned heavily in this direction. A shock flash of Warren's face leapt to the forefront of his mind, grinning that damning grin of his, and for a brief moment Richard wondered if the man had gone so far as to try to kill him in an attempt to get closer to Virginia. But he wouldn't dare…

A shadow flickered in the foreground, and Richard knew he wasn't alone.

"Do you know where you are?" a familiar voice rumbled in the darkness. Richard cursed inwardly, then, when he tried to sit and face the man, outwardly as the now familiar shot of pain ripped at his midsection. He fell back to the floor, gasping in horrified surprise, fighting not to cry out as bits of dust clung to exposed wounds across his back, grinding their way into his flesh.

"You bastard," he bit, grinding his teeth together. The scrape of rubber against stone echoed against the damps walls of his prison, and Richard felt a weight of air settle a few feet from his head. A callused hand pressed gently upon his forehead; a smell of pepper and raw meat assaulted his nose.

"Do. You." the voice repeated, softly and heavily, hot breath dripping into his ear, "know where you are?" Richard's eyes darted from shadow to shadow, cursing the fact that he couldn't see behind his head, as he felt certain he would see Warren's smirking face hanging there if he could. Feeling his neck spasm, Richard tried tilting his chin upwards, but the hand pushed his head firmly, well-manicured nails pressing ever so slightly into dirty skin.

"No," he conceded, snorting as he attempted to arch his back, trying to lift the wound, to keep it from rubbing against the abrasive floor. Whips of oily hair swept across his face, and the scent of red pork grew thicker as the presence knelt closer to Richard's face. He felt a course cheek grace his own, and the callused hands slipped from his forehead until they rested on his naked shoulders.

"You are in the Snow White Memorial Prison," intoned the voice, "in the same cell that I spent five years of my own life trapped within." So Warren was a felon; despite his unsavory predicament, Richard felt the need to claim this small victory. Though he would wonder, in retrospect, if Virginia knew this when she married the man, and how much of her ex-husband's past she knew that she never chose to divulge to her current beau.

A doubt itched in the nether regions of Richard's mind. _Snow White_ Memorial Prison? Richard had seen his fair share of oddly named internment facilities , but none had ever gone so far as to sully their reputations by naming themselves after a fairy tale heroine. Yet his surroundings seemed far too inhumane to be anything other than the worst of human incarceration centers.

"Any advantage you held in the Tenth Kingdom is forfeit," the voice continued. "This is my 'home court,' if you will. My game. I win." The hands clenched tighter around Richard's shoulders before jerking his body mercilessly, flipping him until he lay face down on the cell floor. Richard gasped at the sudden movement, then choked at the sudden influx of stale straw and dirt. The shadow shifted, stood, and two abused shoed stepped into his eye-line.

Hacking coarsely, Richard addressed his captor. "What do you _want _from me, Warren?" The shoes rocked, kicking just enough dust into Richard's eyes to cause discomfort.

"I don't want anything _from_ you, Richard," answered the voice, the shoes turning away towards the oak door. "Just to cause you pain."

"You'll need more than dirt to cause me pain," answered the wounded man. The shoes paused in front of the door. They turned, just slightly, and Richard could imagine the feral eyes of the man before him glaring at him with unbridled fury. The heavy sound of wood against metal scraped against Richard's ear, and the door eased open with a wincing screech. The shoes stepped behind the aging wood, and over the sound of the hinges moaning shut, Richard heard these words:

"There are many, many ways to make a man scream."

A/N: I'm leaving the country for three weeks as of June 23rd. The good news is, I'll have lots of air and bus time to write the next few chapters. The bad news is that I won't ever be near a computer to type up and post said chapters. In the meantime, help yourself to some other great works of fanfiction, even if they aren't by me.


	3. Chapter Three

Wolf stalked down the abandoned halls of the Snow White Memorial Prison. It hadn't surprised him to hear of the prison's disbanding; he'd heard rumblings during his incarceration. Guards would murmur among themselves about the jarring payrolls; prisoners would let sly comments slip past about shoddy accommodations. He'd passed this on to Wendell once, who promised to do something of it when convenient. Nine weeks later, the letter came through the mirror that the prison had been liquidated.

Virginia had sent an angry letter in reply. Wolf had been confused as well; the Wendell he remembered wouldn't destroy lives so lightly. Then he remembered the _kind_ of prisoners interred in Snow White Memorial. Common criminals—robbers, cheaters—they got themselves shipped off to reformatories: high security boarding institutes that 'schooled' petty thieves until they became upstanding members of society. Wolf had a friend that had been sent to one of these for stealing a farmer's chicken. He came back three months later with a scar on the back of his neck that reached up to the middle of his freshly shaved head. He blinked less often than he should have, and got agitated much faster than usual.

Two weeks later the boy killed himself; he climbed to the top of a dying tree and took the ultimate leap of faith. Wolf remembered finding the body with his father. He remembered the serene look of relief on the dead boy's face. He remembered the pink welts that wove dangerously across the insides of the young man's arms. He remembered discovering the words etched deep in the skin of his back as they struggled to dress him in acceptable burial attire. Wolf made a vow that day that he would never give cause to be sent to a reformatory.

Wolves were remarkably good at keeping their word.

Dragging a hand along the moistened corridor wall, Wolf tried to block from his mind the remembered screams and imagined good times that swept across his memory. This was a deadly place for such an innocent name.

And now there was this man, this stupid, _stupid_ man, who had to come along and ruin everything. Wolf didn't hate him, which was a surprise when first discovered (though Wolf knew that he could never hate anyone who treated his Virginia so well), but felt overcome with the burning desire to cause the man unspeakable pain. The need itched in his fingertips to rip flesh from bone; the want to bruise soft skin ached in his fists and feet; in his heart, more than anything else he wanted to make the man scream. He wanted to hear him cry out in agony, in defeat. Wolf wanted to grind the man into a spot on the floor and build him back up again, speck by speck, just to hear the boy beg for mercy.

At the end of the corridor, a weathered, mold encrusted sign announced "Tooth Fairy." Wolf paused, head cocked, pondering the aged lettering. Images of rusted tools and dried blood raced to the forefront of his mind. Brimming with mirth, and chuckling a little to himself, Wolf pushed open the door, and found his paradise.


End file.
